600 wordish

Some people swore the house was haunted. I couldn't understand why. It wasn't built on a burial ground, no one lived in it before us, and it hadn't been standing long enough to gain self-awareness. In the state it was in when my mother and her new architect husband moved into his “grand design,” as my mother called it, the house hardly seemed worth inhabiting, forget haunting. I managed to avoid its superfluous trimmings and pompous wanescotting for the better half of a year before the state declared my grandmother unfit to look after me. After one hundred and ninety seven days of inhabitance, when I first set foot in it, the house looked like a motherless child.

Around my sixth birthday, the glamour of being a single mother wore off and I was left in legal care of my grandmother. Maybe good sense skips a generation; my grandmother waited to have children, while my mother buttered her bun in the oven as if stocks in yeast were dropping. Or, maybe grandma's to blame for waiting so long. Either way, at 78 she was too old to take care of me and at 14, I was too young to take care of her. Together we moved into the lascivious, three story anachronism.

It's shocking how little you can accumulate in the first six years of life. I had nothing except clothes when grandma took me in. So I adopted grandma's things as my own and those are the things we moved in with. At first everything was in one room. “To sort through,” my mother said. It was clear her husband was uncomfortable with our things entering the house, but slowly grandma spread out. Whenever everyone was out, we'd return to another two tone lamp tucked in a corner, the paper towel stand replaced by dish towels, and generation by generation the entire family watched as you descended the stairs.

Two months after we arrived, grandma hung the last portrait while everyone slept. In the morning I was glad to see them together again, somber as ever, if not a bit more faded. I walked into the kitchen, hardly minding the faux-rustic stones under my feet that felt abrupt after coming off carpeting so thick grandma could loose her teeth in it. My mother's husband was reading the paper, only mildly perturbed by someone other than mother entering his life dream.

“Good morning!” My mom's forced pleasantry came from behind me.

“Is that what you would call this?” His tone grated against my skin. He never talked much, but when he did something inevitably negative came out. It made me want to tear down a wall and expose his ugly insides. Instead I went out to the yard. He acted like the only one having a hard time. The kids at school avoided me because of the rumor of blood-curdling screaming coming from the house after it was finished.

My mother started when she thought i was out of range; “How long are you going to blame me for losing the baby?”

“I built this house for our family. It's not easy to sit here and watch it fill up with someone else's, when our child was stillborn in the goddamn foyer!”

“You think it's easy giving birth to a dead thing just because I have a daughter? She might as well be a stranger to me!”

“Why did you invite these strangers into my house? To hang photos of their family as reminder that my family line died? All because you had your first child too young and it created complications?”

“There you go again. 'Your' house, 'your' family line, and my fault, my--” There was the sound of skin on skin and my mother fell silent.

“Without that baby, we share nothing.” Her husband's foot steps receded and I looked for somewhere to hide, but the landscaping, like the interior decorating, was unfinished. My mother came out of the house, check red and eyes stinging. I thought she might apologize for years of absence, or marrying an asshole. But she just looked at me and said, “Nothing was ever the same again after that.”